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astronomy Feature Archive of Articles

This listing shows you every single article in the Astronomy Site! The articles are shown in date order, with the most recent articles on top. You can also use the search feature to search for something specific. These listings are shown 10 articles to a page.

You wouldn't want to know the distance from Boston to San Francisco in inches. And for the same reason, miles aren't very useful in space. After all, it's 26 trillion miles to the next nearest star. So how do astronomers deal with these enormous distances?

One of the greatest astronomers of all time was a Danish nobleman with a metal nose, who was also a publisher, an alchemist and the Imperial Mathematician. His astronomical observations were the key to the modern view of the Solar System.

This ancient constellation contains black holes as massive as a billion Suns, extrasolar planets and a meteor shower acquired from an extinct neighbor. Its brightest star, a red giant 25 times the diameter of the Sun, is a sign that spring is here.

You'd like to know the night sky better? But you haven't a got a telescope,live in a city, don't know any constellations or can't tell a star from a planet? Time to give up? Absolutely not. Time to read on and look up.

What was it like to be one-third of the Apollo 11 crew? Michael Collins, the man in the command module that didn't land on the Moon, tells a fascinating story of astronaut training and space travel. Originally published in 1974, there was a Fortieth Anniversary edition of Carrying the Fire in 2009.

The Moon preserves the history of the early Solar System that weathering has swept from Earth's surface. It lights up our nights and is the ancient timekeeper of human prehistory. A massive collision may have created the Moon from the body of the Earth.

Does the Earth really wobble on its axis? How does the Sun make its heat? What would happen if I fell into a black hole? If you want to know the answers to these and many other questions, this book is a good collection of the things that people have asked "Merlin."